


Like Unto a Man

by disenchanted



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alcohol Withdrawal, Crimes & Criminals, Crozier is Protestant, Dreams and Nightmares, Identity Issues, M/M, Mind Sex, Psychic Bond, Underage Sex, posthumanism, psychic sex dreams
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-08
Updated: 2019-02-08
Packaged: 2019-10-24 13:48:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17705417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disenchanted/pseuds/disenchanted
Summary: While Crozier dries out, he dreams of a man onTerror.





	Like Unto a Man

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a prompt on the [Terror kink meme](https://terrorkinkmeme.dreamwidth.org/396.html?thread=652): Crozier keeps having visions of people Hickey has banged when he’s going through withdrawal (or whenever ya feel) and it’s 50% horny 50% terrible.
> 
> Thanks to Lilliburlero for betaing and for providing me with the phrase 'spit and willingness'.

For if we two be one, and thou play false,  
I do digest the poison of thy flesh.  
—Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors

 

Crozier wanted nothing more, now, but pain whose source he could see. He wanted a gaping wound, gangrenous, or bone broken through skin. He would have given his soul to have his head split open like Private Heather, so long as he knew that that was what hurt him. If he could not have that, he wanted a drink of whisky, not even a bottle or a cup, just enough to wet his mouth. But it had all been poured out. At regular intervals Jopson sat by his bed and fed him broth, after which he would puke into the basin set atop his mattress or drag himself over to the chamberpot to shit, though he could barely keep himself upright.

It should have felt like a purification, a voiding of everything in him that was petty and filthy. He felt instead like the meat of him, the flesh that made up his insides, was being pulled out through any available orifice, and that it would only stop when he was a pile of ragged skin on the deck, a primitive pyramid of organs. It was his fault; he had done this to himself. Oh pity me, pity me, he thought, even when Jopson was there to pity him.

‘The bloody thing is—’ said Crozier, lifting a weak arm out of his bed.

‘Is what, sir?’ said Jopson.

‘Nothing,’ said Crozier, ‘just let me sleep. Let me alone and for God’s sake let me sleep. You’re always in here—bustling. Thinking badly of me.’

‘Not,’ said Jopson, ‘thinking badly of you, sir.’

‘Oh, I always know, Jopson. I’ve been a captain for how many years, and an Irishman for how many? I know when a man’s thinking badly of me. Because he always is, a bit.’

Jopson said he would let Crozier sleep. Crozier couldn’t; he was trapped here, he was mad with his eyes closed or open. When Jopson next came round Crozier would ask him to shoot him in the head, put him down. He would…only Jopson would. It was like what one had to do if a man got rabies.

Though he had left, Jopson was bustling just beyond the closed door of Crozier’s bed cabin. Crozier tried to call out to him to get him to stop, but his throat had dried shut. There were none of the usual sounds: no clatter of the basin, no clinking glass or dripping water. And the footsteps outside were different than Jopson’s. There was more than one set of footsteps, there was more than one man—three men? or only two? Somewhere near Crozier a rat skittered by with its own distinctive footsteps.

The two or three men—it must have been two—were moving towards each other, then apart, then closer still. Linen and wool, neckerchiefs and waistcoats. White cloth worn brownish-yellow by the sweat and soot; navy cloth worn darker. These were Terrors: Fitzjames would never have allowed uncleanliness like this. It all had its roots in Crozier’s own sin.

‘No, no,’ one of them was mouthing, but with a smile almost impossible to see there in the dark, in the hold. His beard scratched when he kissed; his hair was long enough to put one’s fingers in, and curly. Crozier knew these things because he felt them, from inside and out. The curly-haired one had a notch in his teeth from biting thread. These foreign sensations were folded in between the layers of Crozier’s sweaty, cramping flesh.

Arousal struck him so hard that if he were standing he would have gone weak-kneed. He felt himself falling forward into his lover’s arms, he felt himself jerking on his down-stuffed mattress like he’d just woken from a dream in which he’d died.

‘My very own,’ he told his lover, whispering quietly against his ear. Gooseflesh rose on his neck as his lover breathed down it. They were sweet words, but his cockstand was unsweet, importunate and obscene, rising out from unbuttoned slops and pressing into his lover’s thigh, his trembling hands. Crozier knew he oughtn't to be doing this, not with one of his men and not with any man, but he wasn’t himself, and Little would be _Terror_ ’s captain soon enough, Fitzjames the leader of the expedition.

His lover asked him, ‘Fuck me, please—now? I’ve been waiting.’ He said the word ‘waiting’ as if there were a ‘k’ at the end: a hint of provincialism in that spit-shined accent.

To feel it—to penetrate him, that man whose face he could not quite see, but whose body he knew perfectly—was better than anything Crozier had felt since before they had put out from Greenhithe. Better than being dead drunk and letting himself slip, thoughtless, into bed. The lover moved eagerly back against him; their bodies heaved. They were risking death for this and it was worth it. What warmth, what heat. Crozier understood and forgave.

 

* * *

 

Crozier was pinned to the frame of the bed, facing up, and his nose and mouth were crushed into the underside of the wool mattress. It was a larger bed than the one in Crozier’s cabin; it was too large to be on a ship. On the bed two men were fucking, which act Crozier observed from below and above at once.

The man lying back on the mattress, his head on the cotton-stuffed pillow, had red-brown hair like the fur of a dormouse. His arms were spotted with moles; his fingers were slim and his feet small. Crozier couldn’t see his face: it was obscured somehow by the man on top of him, the man he was fucking, who was taller and broader-shouldered, with dark curly hair on his chest and down his stomach, around his prick and up the crack of his arse. There were fleas in the bedding; red speckles rose up the men’s calves and down their forearms. Crozier, too, ached and itched, but the feeling of fucking was a counterweight that came swinging into him. He tried to fuck the dark-haired man harder and found himself immobile, an object that received sensation without being able to act on its own.

The next dream soaked through until Crozier was submerged in it. Here two men were fucking on top of a coat laid out over the sunken earth of a gravesite, their feet near the cracked headstone and their heads near the feet of the corpse in its coffin, who was Crozier. His mouth was filled with dirt he couldn’t swallow. They were hungry, the both of them, and the strains and aches of a rough fuck were enough to distract from it.

The man with the dormouse hair was there again: he was the one Crozier was following. He was confidently sober in the way of a man who had never had the compulsion to drink in the first place. The other man was drunk almost to the point of losing consciousness. Crozier recognised this but could gain no relief from it. He was being taken like a prize, fucked from behind. There was the sense that whatever dignity had once been in him had been broken, slowly and deliberately, and that the man fucking him had been the one to break it, over weeks and months of which Crozier, with his imperfect vision, could see nothing. The sensation Crozier shared, the emotion Crozier shared; the memories, the thoughts, were invisible. In the absence of self-recrimination the delight was twice as loud. He was hurting this man: yes, he felt, yes, I ought to, it feels good.

‘Are you done yet,’ the drunk man mumbled.

‘Quiet,’ said the dormouse, ‘there’s a nightwatchman that does rounds here. He catches us and we’re back in the New Bailey again.’

‘Let him,’ said the drunk man. ‘I don’t give a damn.’

‘I think you’d give a damn if you were hanged. Or transported to Van Diemen’s Land—what about that? I would. It’d be suffering. I don’t intend to suffer more than I can help it.’

Having said that, he put his hand over the mouth of the man he was fucking and spent inside of him, and let his spend ease the way so that he could go on fucking him for as long as he was able. Crozier felt it as if he were the one spending, and as he rose into sudden consciousness he realised he was. There was another stain, another streak of fluid, on his sick-stained shirt and bedding. His vision had narrowed; he could only see the bulkhead in front of him, the empty shelf built next to his bed and the shadows cast by the guttering candle. He could still hear that voice, the Lancashire or Yorkshire accent: I don’t intend to suffer. Was he sharing his pleasure with Crozier or taunting him with it?

Jopson held his shoulder to keep him upright, and folded his fingers around a cup of tea. He took a drink and gagged it back up again, mixing his spit and bile with the tea still in the cup. To prove to Jopson that he was not ungrateful, he took another drink, and spit it up just as quickly.

‘Shall I fetch the basin?’ asked Jopson.

‘No, no. Don’t do that. Take this away, I can’t drink anything.’

‘I’ll be here, sir. On the other side of the door. Lieutenant Little will be returning from _Erebus_ in an hour with news from Captain Fitzjames. If you hear our voices in the captain’s cabin—’

‘Talk loudly,’ said Crozier, ‘so they won’t hear me puking. How are the men?’

‘Content, sir,’ said Jopson, shutting the door to Crozier’s bed-cabin.

While he was in, Jopson had replaced the candle in the chamberstick. Crozier wondered whether Jopson had smelt it in the air that he had spent, whether he had known what it was or passed it off as his imagination, or whether the stench of vomit had covered it up sufficiently. He wished that he could have protected Jopson from this: his fallibility, his being of the flesh. He wished that he had not given Little his pistol.

 

* * *

 

His fingers were so deeply callused that even against the straw mattress, which scraped his chest and his thighs and the side of his face, he felt nothing through them. He had been picking oakum and splitting rocks every day for months; his hands had blistered and hardened, ripped open and hardened again. He was being given a reprieve, now: he had only been walking the treadwheel for twenty minutes that morning when the warder with the fair soft hair took him out of the workshop and back to the male misdemeanours’ ward, where he and a couple of dozen others slept at nights. It was empty now except for the two of them: he on a mattress that was not the one he slept in, the warder half-clothed on top of him, buggering him with an intensity that seemed not to be driven by real pleasure, or even a desire for pleasure.

The warder had disliked him at first, and found petty reasons to punish him. One morning the warder held him back from going to the workshops and asked him if he was a bugger. He told the warder, ‘It’s not what I’m in for, anyway,’ and the warder said, ‘So you are one.’ The warder asked him whether he wouldn’t like twice a week to be given a half-hour’s break from work. He said yes he would, and it was true. He didn’t like to be buggered, but he liked it better than the wheel. Some of the other inmates might have wanted to beat him for it, giving it up to a warder in exchange for a half-hour of lesser pain and sometimes an extra bit of bread or meat, but he had no sense of honour, not even in the way that criminals are meant to have. He liked not to suffer. He didn’t intend to suffer more than he could help it.

Frustrated, unsatisfied, the warder got off of him and pulled him up by his arm, indicating that he should suck his prick. He did: the taste was filthy, even there in that filthy ward, but he went slowly, careful not to do it well enough that the warder would spend and send him back to work, or poorly enough that he would get angry and give up and send him back to work. He thought of the last man he’d enjoyed sucking off, a sweet, tall boy from Northumbria who’d found work in a foundry in Salford. The boy had scars on his left arm and leg where he’d been burned, though he worked as ably as ever, and said he didn’t mind it either way. If the warder wasn’t fucking his throat, making him choke, he might have been able to get hard remembering the boy’s thick arse, the dark hair on his thighs and around his hole, which opened very readily.

Crozier was hard, even if the man whose body he inhabited wasn’t. He felt the man’s desire for an end to his suffering and lamented it and was hard nonetheless, haunted by the sensation of being buggered, knowing that this was not entirely real and taking some comfort in it, in knowing that he was only an observer and not a player in the scene, that this pain had already been felt and there was nothing he could do to prevent it or to relieve it. The warder spent on the dusty floor and rubbed his spend into the stone with the sole of his boot.

The taste in his mouth was vile; he spit, then spit again. The warder laughed but did not punish him, only told him to get his clothes on again so that he could take him back to the workshop.

‘We could go again,’ he told the warder, smiling.

‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you,’ rejoined the warder, and gestured for him to move along.

Who was it whose memories Crozier was being forced to relive? It was a Terror, one of his men, one of his charges: a face he saw while walking the main deck, a face he recognised but about which he felt nothing. Had he ever touched this man before, even in a brush of shoulders? Did this man feel himself invaded, wherever he was now—holystoning the deck, sleeping in his hammock? Or did he sleep more soundly than Crozier did? Crozier had never personally known anyone whose life he saw in this way, before. They had always been oceans away or decades away, unreal.

By the time he came to himself again he was sweating and shivering, convulsing as his guts cramped. He wanted nothing less than he wanted to go through the misery of expelling something or other. He would have agreed to walk the wheel himself not to feel this, to suck a prison warder’s cock not to feel this, never mind about honour. But there was no one here with whom to make the bargain. There was no warder here: he was his own captor. He had let himself in for this and now he was getting it. He wondered why the man had been in prison.

 

* * *

 

Hot fluid filled his mouth: it was too smooth to be puke, too metallic to be spend. It was blood, dribbling from his lips, staining his chin. He had bit the inside of a man’s wrist and torn out flesh with his teeth, breaking veins. This was because the man had been trying to strangle him. His vision was spotted white, his throat ached. It was only the bite on the wrist, the spilling of blood, that had loosened the man’s grip on him enough for him to wriggle free. He could have run, but was humiliated at having been caught stealing from this man, a whoremaster (not his own, for he had no master). To relieve his own embarrassment, to exact his revenge for it, he opened his pocketknife and stuck the man several times in the side, between his ribs.

He got out of the house before he knew how badly he had really hurt the man, who could have died or could have scarcely been scratched. Even if the man had scarcely been scratched he could have died of the wound going inflamed. He, the thief, was pleased to have escaped, and with four shillings sixpence secreted away in his pockets.

In the dark unpaved street, which was in so low a place as to lack lamplights either gas or candle, he wiped the blood off his face with the sleeve of his dark coat. There was a stirring in his stomach, a slight stiffness to his prick.

 

* * *

 

The next time Crozier was aware of Jopson’s presence, he was well enough at least to swallow spoonfuls of beef broth without vomiting. This he did morosely, disappointed that he was not going be able to starve to death. The only thing that made it tolerable was that Jopson put a hand on his shoulder to steady him. How long had it been since someone else had touched him, since he had felt someone else’s body against his, in fact and not in these horrible dreams? He had not heard Little and Jopson in the captain’s cabin.

‘Did he come?’ slurred Crozier, having finished his broth. The effort of digestion was weighing him back down into sleep.

‘Did who come, sir?’ asked Jopson.

‘Little. To give news. You said he was returning from _Erebus_.’

Jopson, taking the bowl and the spoon away, said, ‘That was yesterday, sir. He said that the Terrors who are berthing on _Erebus_ have settled in nicely, more or less. Captain Fitzjames has expressed some concern about their hygiene, but I should think they’ll shape up fairly quickly.’

‘Now that my hands are off them,’ said Crozier.

‘They’ll be glad to be returned to your care,’ said Jopson, ‘when you’re ready, sir.’

Though he had just eaten he was piteously hungry, so much so that he felt nothing in his stomach, only a swelling ache in his joints, a pain behind his eyes, a dry mouth. It was the kind of hunger that asked for drink as distraction. He smelt juniper and clutched his hand to his mouth, retching. There were bruises on his arms and legs like the sort he had seen on the victims of scurvy. Crozier felt these things because he—the thief, the prisoner, the dormouse—had been hungry in this way, once. As the man’s captain, Crozier was bound to share his suffering. If he was too selfish to have seen that before, he saw it now. He saw the strange lines and knobbles of bone beneath thin flesh, the pattern of moles on his arms; a smear of reddish hair as he caught his muddled reflection in window-glass.

The house, a red-brick terraced house like every other on its street, was one that no one in particular seemed to own. The street was dingy, but the steps of the other houses had at least been swept: the brick step in front of this house was blackened with grime. Though it wasn’t mill-workers’ lodging, there was a cotton mill near enough that the smell was heavy in the air. A fire was going in the kitchen, where they stopped for a minute so that he could be given some bread to eat. Another fire was going in the room to which he was brought, where there was a quilt and wool mattress on a worn wooden bedframe and a writing desk in the corner. One of the desk’s legs was broken at the bottom, propped up by a scrap of wood.

The boy who brought him here was not so much older than him, nineteen or twenty at most, and finely dressed. His coat was a dark blue wool, tailored to cinch at the waist, and his waistcoat was green-and-white check. The leather of his shoes gleamed. He had a little dark mustache, not a beard. Despite his fine appearance he was not a gentleman, he was much lower than that, he was almost as low as the thief himself.

Next to the writing-desk were two crates of silver and pewter things, trowels and platters and jugs, all mismatched. These were things that had been stolen and now would be sold. There had been more in the parlour, pieces of fine cloth and pocketwatches, snuffboxes, rings, which the thief had been told he would profit by. He would have to work for it, but it was better work by far than what he might get in a mill or a colliery, and he’d earn much more than he ever would by begging or picking pockets.

The first night he spent in that house he spent in that bed, with the boy who wore the blue coat. The two of them slept in their shirts; the bed was warm and there were no vermin in it, nothing to bother him by itching or biting. He had very nearly fallen asleep—Crozier was waiting for it, hoping that if the thief slept he would sleep too, dreamlessly—when the boy put his hand on his hip and said, ‘How would you like to earn a shilling, Evan?’

The shilling he could have taken or left. It was the approval he wanted, the trust of this blue-coated boy who knew more and could do more with the world than he could: _he_ being the boy who would become the thief, the prisoner, the dormouse, the Terror; the one who had given his name as Evan. Crozier knew it was a false name but could not see his true name because Evan was not thinking it. As the boy lifted Evan’s shirt, one of them—Evan or Crozier—thought, Oh Christ let me not suffer this.

The boy offered him a second shilling if he were to let him put his prick in his arsehole, which Evan knew was done but had not cared to try for himself, and did not care to try now. He said as much, and the boy said that he had been very kind to him, and had given him fresh bread and a nice place to sleep, and would give him much more than that if he did well.

Crozier was more frightened of the thought that he might somehow intervene than of what he would inevitably witness. He was so blazingly, so grotesquely angry. Was it righteous of him, or was he humiliated because he suspected himself of taking pleasure in this, the memory of someone else’s indignity? He feared he might fling Evan’s arms up to push the other boy away, but Evan was still, his heartbeat was slow. He lifted his leg and let the boy put his greased prick in his arse. It hurt, but it was not unbearable, only distasteful.

When the boy touched Evan’s own prick, which act Evan was more familiar with, he brought it to a stand. It was Crozier’s stand and Evan’s: they were of one body now. Crozier felt the sprightliness and spiteful health of his young limbs; his hunger, his bruises, the sores left by vermin on his skin; his sobriety, his clear-headedness, and worst of all his desire—for glory, for revenge on the world that had only given him life on the condition that it was this life, this miserable scrabbling. He tried to wake up, to stop seeing what he was being shown, and found himself locked together with Evan, moving perpetually within and against him.

‘It’s all right,’ the boy was saying, petting him on the hip, ‘you don’t mind it now, do you?’

‘No,’ said Evan, who realised that he was sinning and wondered whether he was due to be punished for it. After a minute passed and no punishment came he decided that there was no reason to feel any shame, or to repent. If Crozier could have spoken to him he would have told him to wait longer.

It was raining. Evan hadn’t noticed at first, but the rain fell hard, and the wind now and then rattled the glass. He had spent nights out of doors in rain like this, and was thankful to be in a house, in a clean bed, with a fire going. And it was sensation, anyway, and why ought he to embrace some sensation but not all? He seemed to know instinctually how to pursue pleasure, to roll his hips and spread his thighs, and by that make the hand on his prick better gratification.

God help him but Crozier was thankful, if only because he hoped that if Evan spent it would put Crozier back into his own body, and his own time. Crozier urged him along: he surrendered his own perspective to Evan’s, he let his arousal flow outwards. He asked, as he spent—as Evan spent, tensing, bewildered by the utter knockdown strength of his own finish, which was inessential to the boy who fucked him—to be forgiven.

After the last shudder Crozier prepared himself for the sourness of his own aged body and found himself with Evan still, subject to a sudden traitorous pain from the buggering, which had been so unobjectionable before. The boy clutched him about the waist and put him onto his stomach so that he could better fuck him. Evan’s face was hot against the pillow, the resplendently soft, clean pillow. The graveyard soil was on Crozier’s tongue, and the blood of the man whose arm Evan had bitten, would bite. The dull pain of being fucked too quickly and with too much force was layered over with some other pain that came in sharp arcs and flashes. Crozier thought of the way each tail of a cat o’nines seems, for a long semisecond at the height of each stroke, to hang suspended, poised to inflict suffering, before flicking invisibly ahead to where the forces of the world have willed it go.

 

* * *

 

Evan kept Crozier with him for too long. Crozier was there as the other boy came to his own crisis, spilling over Evan’s back, then shoving him to the side so that he himself could lie down. It felt as though Evan had Crozier by the collar and was forcing him to look. Crozier was given the raw ripped-flesh feeling in his arse, the dryness of his lips and tongue, the dull ache of his head at the usual hunger returning. It had been hours and hours now since he’d had that bit of bread. Could he ask for more, or would it be better to wait for the boy to fall asleep and get it himself? There were others—all men, mostly young—in the other bedroom and downstairs, but they hadn’t paid Evan much mind when he’d come in before. He was one of theirs now, a thief among a pack of thieves.

He pulled the bedsheet in between his legs and wiped his arse with it, thinking that at the very least he should be allowed that liberty. He lay awake.

Crozier was given something else: a moment in the same house, on the same bed, on a different day. The sky was grey but the sun was up, and there was no one else in the room. It had been years, perhaps, since Crozier had last been there; Evan was older now, unequivocally a man. He sat on the bed and looked in a ladies’ engraved silver hand mirror, a thing he had stolen and was carefully appraising. The engraving was fine; the glass itself was spotted. Though Evan was not looking at himself, Crozier saw him anyway, and for the first time saw his face, and knew him by it, and knew Cornelius Hickey for who he was.

 

* * *

 

It was possible that Crozier was dead already. He could have choked, unconscious, on his own vomit, and been trapped inside _Terror_ ’s caulker’s mate because he happened to be there when he died. He was stuck to Hickey like a leech. Hickey’s blood was in him now, sustaining him, determining how he was shaped and what he felt.

But there he was, shaped like himself again, feeling like nothing else on earth. There he was in his bed-cabin, on his bed, with a clean blanket, a clean shirt, and a clean face. Too weak to call out, he looked round for Jopson. The door to the bed-cabin was open and showed black beyond it: not the captain’s cabin unlighted or moonlit but nothing, a void that would take him if he crossed the threshold. Hickey stood just inside the bed-cabin, wearing only his small clothes.

‘I heard you call for me, sir,’ said Hickey.

Crozier said, ‘I didn’t mean to,’ but Hickey was climbing into his bed, settling down on top of him.

‘No,’ protested Crozier, ‘I wouldn’t ask this of you.’

He was lying, he would have asked this of Hickey, he was ruled by his desires; but he would have allowed Hickey to refuse him. Would he have? He had never allowed Sophia to refuse him. Why would he have allowed it from this man, slight and ignoble, more or less worthless?

‘Please,’ said Crozier, ‘I don’t want you to do this. You mustn’t.’

‘Yes, you do,’ said Hickey.

There was no wind against the glass in the captain’s cabin; there was no creaking of the ship’s timbers, or footsteps in the passageway outside. Crozier heard nothing of the crew. His yard was stiff, and even its stirring exhausted him. It seemed he’d done nothing for years but puke and spend, puke and spend. His body, this hideous flesh, had given up the last of itself. As Hickey rubbed his yard he felt a warmth behind his eyes, a sort of wetness, like he had done when John had chastised him for being difficult to love.

This man was not who he said he was. His name was neither Cornelius nor Evan. He had kidnapped the girl; he could have killed her. Lieutenant Irving had caught him with the steward, Gibson (Gibson was the one who had said, ‘I’ve been waiting’). All the same Crozier was obliged to protect him. He could not hurt him. But hadn’t he hurt him already, when he had had him stripped naked (not naked: his small clothes were around his ankles) and lashed till he was weeping, bleeding, in front of all the men, Gibson and Irving and Jopson and the rest? Would buggering him now make a difference? Crozier’s yard was rigid in Hickey’s palm. The door stood open onto unmapped space, the Northwest Passage that they would never find and that had never existed. Crozier could have been a great man; he knew then that he would not be.

When he stripped Hickey naked he saw that the wounds from the lashing were still healing, no longer bloody but pink and tender, raised enough that Crozier could run his fingers over the lines and feel out where they began and ended, where they crossed. Hickey spat on his fingers and worked them into his arse, and went on doing so even as he crawled down the bed and took Crozier’s yard in his mouth. Crozier touched Hickey’s hair, untucked it from behind his ears. He wrapped a thick strand of it around his fist like a bridle and fucked Hickey’s throat until his face was as red as it was when he was being lashed. So he had gone mad, so he had perished. That only meant that he could do as he liked now, without half-hearted thoughts of salvation.

Crozier buggered Hickey. He lay back and let Hickey ride his prick while facing away from him. Deliriously, with his eyes half-shut and his vision wavering as if he were drunk, he saw the scars on Hickey’s arse and remembered what the wounds had looked like when they were fresh. Then he slipped inside of Hickey fully; his eyes were Hickey’s eyes and his skin was Hickey’s skin, and he felt the stretch of Hickey’s arsehole around his own yard, the pain of penetration to which Hickey subjected himself, thrilled that in doing so he was subjecting Crozier to it also.

Though his prick was stiff, its head dark red, Hickey’s hands were palm-down on the thin stretch of mattress between Crozier’s thighs. His breath was rough. Crozier took Hickey’s prick in hand and frigged him the way he did himself, sometimes, late in the first watch, having woken more hungover than drunk and in need of some other sensation to distract him. There was pleasure: Crozier wasn’t sure if it was Hickey’s or his own.

Which parts of this belonged to the mind, which parts the body? Was Hickey there, in his captain’s bed, or was he in a hammock strung up on the orlop, tugging himself off alone? Did God see them? Or the devil? Or the creature that was circling them?

‘Let me go,’ said Crozier.

Hickey said, ‘You’re the one who’s not letting go of me.’ As if he were dead, as if he were a ghost to which Crozier clung. Hickey was alive; Crozier had enough ghosts without him.

Because it was the only thing Crozier could do, he brought Hickey to a finish. His forearm ached, his guts clenched; he spasmed along with each flash of discomfort Hickey felt. The lurch in Hickey’s stomach just before he spent echoed in Crozier as the pain of the rack or the wheel. The relief of spending, finally—of having Hickey spend—was worth it. Knowing that nobody but Hickey could hear him, Crozier cried out.

‘There,’ said Hickey, ‘there we are—’

 

* * *

 

‘And her bow has risen another three inches,’ said Jopson. He made some noise with a basin and cloth and water; he was dipping the cloth into the basin, wringing the excess water out of it before daubing it along Crozier’s hairline, where the sweat was heaviest.

Jopson performed this ritual for his own comfort more than anything else. Crozier didn’t think he had stopped sweating, and didn’t see the point in cleaning himself until it was all over, if it was ever over. If he was going to die, he didn’t mind dying filthy.

‘The caulker’s mate, Mr Hickey,’ said Crozier. He pushed himself up, not knowing whether the slight wetness he felt on his thighs was sweat or spend and not wanting to lift the blanket to find out. He took the cup of tea with lemon juice that Jopson offered him: it wouldn’t do for him to dry out only to develop scurvy, not when he intended to abandon the ships once he was well. ‘Cornelius Hickey, from Limerick. Twenty-four...no, twenty-seven now. Is he still on _Terror_?’

‘Yes, he was kept behind,’ said Jopson. ‘Mr Darlington required his services.’

‘And Mr Gibson, too?’

‘Yes, of course.’ When Crozier ventured no further questions Jopson asked, ‘Is there something you’d like me to do for you, sir?’

‘Nothing,’ said Crozier. ‘This is enough. Perhaps—some bread or some meat. I’ll sleep until you bring it, and then I’ll try to walk. Can’t let myself rot away.’

When Jopson left the bed-cabin Crozier watched him pass the threshold into the captain’s cabin. The lamps were lighted and their reflections shone in the windows, which ice had made opaque. Jopson’s footsteps sounded in the passageway; so did someone else’s. Around him Crozier heard the noise of the ship and the men living in her, quieter now that so many had gone to _Erebus_ but there nonetheless, a reassurance that Crozier had not yet been cast out.

 

* * *

 

The bulkhead was as cold as the ice itself against his palm, and the wood was rough. The heat from Fraser’s patent stove didn’t reach them here in the forepeak. Taking his hand away wouldn’t rip the skin from it, but if he kept it there for very long it would begin to go numb, and his fingers would be clumsy if he stroked his lover’s hair or his yard.

The lover’s curly hair was familiar to Crozier now. Hickey stood on his toes to kiss the back of the man’s neck and breathe the scent of his Macassar oil, and Crozier remembered how Gibson would stoop in the doorway of the wardroom, a silver-covered dish or a sherry jug in his hands. If there were light Crozier would have seen, through Hickey’s eyes, the burnished-copper red of his hair.

‘The tilting’s only getting worse,’ said Gibson. He always spoke very quietly. ‘I expect the bow’s up another couple of inches at least. We might have to abandon her, and take _Erebus_ as the flagship again. But _Erebus_ has been lame since the beginning of the first winter.’

‘Would you be sorry to leave _Terror_?’ asked Hickey.

He spat onto his fingers and rubbed his spit into Gibson’s arsehole. It was the sort of undignified gesture that he gloried in: he licked the same fingers and worked them in again, fucking Gibson with them, breathing hard enough against Gibson’s back that the linen of his shirt floated in and out. Sometimes when they did this Hickey brought olive oil he’d begged from Dr McDonald for an imaginary earache; sometimes Gibson would sacrifice a bit of the oil he used in his hair. Sometimes, as now, they had to make do with spit and willingness. Rats circled them shyly, pattering on the deck.

‘Yes,’ said Gibson hazily, ‘I am sorry for it, but I don’t think she’ll be under full sail again. Whether we find the passage or retreat, we’ll be on _Erebus_.’

Or they would walk out, abandon _Erebus_ along with _Terror_. Hickey, the man who called himself Hickey, would like that. There was more in these lands and these waters than what was in these ships.

When Hickey fucked Gibson, Crozier felt very little, and then nothing. There were the staggered rushes of breath, the scratching and wrinkling of wool, cotton and linen; the putrid scent of bilgewater, the sweeter scent of unwashed clothing and the half-clean effort-damp bodies which between them traded pleasure and comfort, frustration and gratification. Crozier was caught at the center of the exchange, belonging to neither one nor the other, nor to himself. But he was shaking himself loose: he was like cloth caught on a nail, ripping free, or a sail being set.

In the passageway outside of the captain’s cabin there were footsteps. The ice shifted, and _Terror_ ’s timbers let go a miserable bellow which Crozier in his bed-cabin and Hickey in the forepeak heard. Crozier saw Hickey’s hand—his tapered fingers white, almost bloodless, lifting away from the bulkhead—and rose from bed, and after that would see nothing from Hickey again.

 

* * *

 


End file.
